Gerald Seymour
Traitor's Kiss
For Alfie
…Prologue
He held the package tightly, as if he were reluctant to let it go. His calloused and scarred fingers gripped the envelope of cheap brown paper; the tips indented the paper, such was the tightness with which he held it. There was no writing on the envelope, nothing to indicate to whom it should be delivered.
'I was in my cabin. We needed fuel, and I was using the calculator, working out the exchange rate, and then he was just there, no knock. One moment the door was closed, the next it was open and he was filling it, and he took this from inside his jacket, and…'
Mowbray, the veteran, said quietly, 'I think it's better, Mr Harris, if we just start at the beginning. In your own time.' He smiled reassuringly. The head of Russia Desk, Bertie Ponsford, beamed. Behind Harris, her pencil poised, Alice North sat with the shorthand pad on her knee. At the end of the table, detached from the rest of them, was the naval officer who wore slacks and a blazer and had loosened his tie as if to relax the stranger.
In a cabinet the tape-recorder was already turning, but it was general practice to keep recorders and microphones, which intimidated civilians, out of sight. It was mid-morning, and coffee and a plate of digestive biscuits were on the table. A cup had been poured by Alice for Harris, but he had not touched it: to have lifted the cup and drunk the coffee would necessitate releasing his hold on the envelope that had brought them together.
'Yes, from the beginning.' Ponsford had a deceptively gentle voice, but his features were those of a scavenging fox. 'You are Frederick Harris, part-owner with two others of the Marie Eugenie, oceangoing trawler, home port of Hull, and thirteen days ago, on the thirtieth of July, you strayed into Russian territorial waters, going after cod. Do people call you Fred or Freddie, Mr Harris?'
'Fred.'
'Well, Fred, there you are, hauling in the cod, and that's the beginning, so let's take it from there, please.'
The room chosen for the meeting was off Pall Mall. In a cul-de-sac out of sight of the gentlemen's clubs, watering-holes and restaurants, the house had a fine Georgian facade, and the ground-floor reception rooms boasted exquisite moulded ceilings, high sash windows and antique furniture — all except this room. Here, the furnishings and decor were deliberately tacky, so that the location should not appear too grand. The table was covered by a plastic sheet adorned with patterns of primroses, the chairs were steel-tube-framed with canvas seats, the thin carpet was bright yellow, except at the door where generations of feet had pounded it to a faded orange. Few of those summoned to a meeting with representatives of the Secret Intelligence Service and personnel from the military were at ease, and the presentation of the room was designed to minimize inevitable apprehension.
'Well, you know how it is.' Harris shrugged. 'It's partly the stocks and also the quotas, but the North Sea is fished out. I've got a mortgage on the boat that's killing me. I've got to go where the money is, got to take the chance. Another couple of years like the last two, and I'm gone. There's been trawling in my family for the last hundred and twenty years — it won't happen for my kids. So we go up north, give it a try there. We'd gone by the North Cape, that's Norwegian, and kept on east, got as far as the East Bank, which is Russian. We're thirty sea miles off the coast, well out into the Barents Sea, and we'd got a really good catch in. It was foul weather, just right for us, thick fog and visibility down to a hundred metres, couldn't have been better. Then, in the space of five minutes, there were two calls over the radio. The first was from their Fisheries Protection lot: we should identify ourselves. The second was from a Russian vesseclass="underline" they'd a casualty on board, needed help, and giving a position. I put it all together, says to myself that we'll use the casualty as the reason for us being there, and come out smelling of roses, or sweeter.
'The catch was in the holds, the nets were stowed, and we sailed to the distress call. It was one of their research ships, on its way up to north of Spitzbergen, and a crewman had double-fractured his leg. The weather was too bad to get a helicopter out, and they didn't want to turn back and lose out on their schedule. So, we're like the Angel Michael showing up. The guy was transferred on board and I told their skipper that I'd run him straight back into Murmansk. We got a crate of vodka for our trouble. I radioed ashore and told the Fisheries Protection what I was doing. We made it into Murmansk, the guy was taken off to hospital, and instead of having the Marie Eugenie impounded and me being in court, we were everybody's favourite flavour. Get me straight, Murmansk isn't a place I'd take my wife for a weekend break, but they made us really welcome. Couldn't do enough for us — the next morning I'd one hell of a hangover.
'Fuel's dirt cheap there, a fraction of what it is at home, so I loaded up to the top. I was waiting on the tide, working out what the diesel was going to cost me, scratching through every pound sterling that I'd got on board, and what my crew had…and then he was in the door of my cabin. He was in uniform, quite a high-ranking officer of the regular navy, not merchant. We'd had harbour people on board, shabby sort of folk, but this one was immaculate. Well-pressed tunic, crease in his trousers, clean shirt, tie, like he worked in an office, not on a warship. But he looked as if he were about to shit himself — sorry — very tense and stressed up. There wasn't any preamble. I looked at him and he looked at me, big staring eyes. Just for a moment there was real fear in his face. He said, blurted it out, but a whisper, in English: "I have a communication that I request you pass to your intelligence authorities." I'm a hundred sea miles from Norwegian waters, I've got an illegal catch on board, and then he's in my cabin talking espionage. I suppose I went white. A moment like that, and the big word that belts you is provocation, or it's a setup, a sting. I didn't know what to say…
'What I can tell you? Him and me, equally, we were both about to shit ourselves. He had what I'd call an honest face — there wasn't anything devious about him. I'm not a great judge of people, I can pick a crewman but that's about it. He had a face that I reckoned sincere. He must have realized that I thought he was bad news. He looked over his shoulder, satisfied himself that we weren't overheard, then said, sort of simple: "I am taking a very much greater risk than I am asking of you." I had to believe him — but what if he were followed? What if he were being watched? I must have nodded, maybe I held my hand out. He took this envelope out from inside his jacket, and he gave it me. I asked him who he was, but he just shook his head. The only other thing he said was: "Please…please…see that it gets to those authorities…please." Then he was gone and I'd the envelope in my hand. When I looked out of the porthole I saw him scramble up on to the quay and he just walked away, like nothing had happened. My first thought was to chuck the envelope over the side. But it was his face that stopped me. Then I moved fast across my cabin, fast like I'd a ferret down my trousers. I opened my safe double quick, and I locked it in there, right at the back.
'Within an hour I'd paid off the diesel and we'd slipped the moorings. We went up the Kola inlet like we were in a regatta race, couldn't get clear of Murmansk fast enough. All the time I was thinking that if a cutter or a patrol boat came out towards us, I was going to be back in my cabin, getting the safe open and heaving that packet as far as I could chuck it — but there wasn't any cutter or patrol boat. Twenty sea miles up the inlet is Severomorsk, where the nuke submarines are and the heavy cruisers, the big naval base. I was shaking like a leaf as we passed it, couldn't hold the wheel steady, and the other boys — none of them had seen him come on board or leave — thought it was the hangover. Then I saw him. He was a tiny figure out on the end of a groin, all alone, and he must have been waiting there to see us leave. I needed the binoculars to check it was him. He didn't wave to us, just smoked a cigarette, and when we'd gone by him he turned away and kept walking.